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Blood Simple and the Man Who Wasn't There Paul Coughlin, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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Blood Simple and the Man Who Wasn't There Paul Coughlin, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia The Mark of Cain: Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There Paul Coughlin, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Most of Joel and Ethan Coen's films are based upon original screenplays, but in many cases these scripts are influenced by other, often literary, sources. The Coen brothers' affection for adaptation is illustrated in their loose trilogy of crime fiction based upon the writings of the roman noir authors of the 1930s and 1940s. These films -- Blood Simple (1984), Miller's Crossing (1990) and The Big Lebowski (1998) -- revive the "spirit" and "style" of America's lauded trio of hard-boiled authors: James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, respectively. The recent Coen film, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), returns to James M. Cain as a touchstone, reinventing his fiction through the agency of additional influences such as intertextuality, genre conventions, authorship and cultural conditions. The diverse treatment that the Coens afford Cain in both Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There demonstrates the manner by which adaptations from one source can be re-articulated into widely divergent subsidiary texts. The films of Joel and Ethan Coen bolster the contention that adaptations hold a position relative to their sources that is more reliant on principles of reinterpretation rather than fidelity. James Naremore announces that most analysis of adaptation "stops at the water's edge, as if hesitant to move beyond literary formalism and ask more interesting questions." (Naremore, 2000: 9) Naremore contemplates an adaptation hypothesis which looks past simple issues of fidelity and the transference of narrative units, and instead focuses upon the many and varying influences which dictate the nature and style of the filmic adaptation. Joel and Ethan Coen's Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There, films that call upon James M. Cain for inspiration, illustrate the innumerable factors which influence the adaptation beyond the primary source material. Blood Simple forecast the manner by which the Coens would work with well known literary material, extracting the essence of an author's style and re-deploying its elements in original ways. With Blood Simple, the Coens declared that they "liked the hard-boiled style, and [they] wanted to write a James M. Cain story and put it in a modern context." (Mottram, 2000: 25) And though the Coens have readily acknowledged Cain as a foundation, Blood Simple is informed by a series of inspirations and influenced by a multitude of sources. (Hinson, 2000: 34-35) These stimulants complement and contend with the style of Cain to create a recognisably derivative, but wholly unique text. The Man Who Wasn't There also invokes the spirit of Cain but in a notably distinct manner to that which was employed for Blood Simple. Although Graham Fuller observes that The Man Who Wasn't There, like Blood Simple, bears the mark of Cain, suggesting it is "another movie in which Cain is the prime influence," he goes on to contend that it is a "puritanical revision" of the author's work. (Fuller, 2001: 12 and 14) The narrative of a quiet barber who is inextricably drawn into matters of murder, extortion, suicide, and dry-cleaning, owes much of its structure and design to both Double Indemnity and Career in C Major -- two Cain novellas which explore the congregation of the exceptional with the mundane. Regarding this apparent influence, Joel Coen stated that "Cain was very much in our minds, because he was interested in crime stories that involved people in their everyday lives at work, and not about underworld figures. People who worked in banks, or the insurance business, or restaurants." (Pulver, 2002: 3) Unlike the contemporary setting of Blood Simple, the Coens locate The Man Who Wasn't There in a typical Cain milieu, placing the action in a 1940s Californian town. Yet, even though this film contains an apparently more ardent connection to Cain than Blood Simple, it ultimately proves to be a more complete departure from his fiction, challenging the primacy of fidelity in adaptation theory. Fidelity is a flawed measure for the quality or worth of an adaptation. In the introduction to his study on film adaptation, Naremore foregrounds the significance of intertextuality in the art of adaptation, stating we "now live in a media-saturated environment dense with cross- references and filled with borrowings from movies, books, and every other form of representation." (Naremore, 2000: 12-13) The Coen brothers' films clearly exhibit the hallmarks of influences that range from mass entertainment through to high culture. Although unmistakably inspired by the style of James M. Cain, Blood Simple also carries the influences of crime fiction conventions, Alfred Hitchcock, and the uncommon landscapes of Texas. While The Man Who Wasn't There calls not only upon Cain, but also Albert Camus, film noir, and even the Coens' own Barton Fink (1991). The issues of genre and intertextuality complicate the matter of fidelity by foregrounding the existence of other inspirations relevant to the adaptation. Genre concerns are central to the structure of Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There, while intertextuality operates to both define these texts as adaptations and to demonstrate the widely diverse collection of influences that move beyond the ostensible literary precursors. Cataloguing the myriad influences in the construction of an adaptation makes clear the impossibility of an untainted fidelity between source and adaptation. As much as Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There draw upon Cain, there exist many instances of direct inversion or deliberate subversion that point to the Coens' typical ironic interplay with antecedent material. And the Coens' rampant irony -- reflected in their often contradictory attitudes to the material they are adapting -- suggests they are more than simply pastiche-filmmakers who copy the works of others. Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There reveal a subversive agenda that leads to a reinterpretation of prior representations as well as a reappraisal of the fidelity principle in the assessment of adaptations. Fidelity: James M. Cain and Crime Fiction Joel and Ethan Coen's films negotiate the issue of fidelity by furnishing adaptations which reject a relationship to one model. Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There are James M. Cain-inspired films without being based on any particular Cain text. Rather, these films engage with Cain's style and concerns. Adaptation theory initially traveled through theoretical territory which valorised the original text and sought to comment exclusively on the ability of the film to attain such levels of "perfection." Naremore defines this approach as "translation," in which studies investigate "how codes move across sign systems" focusing primarily on "textual fidelity." (Naremore, 2000: 7-8) With Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There there exists no model which the Coens can be faithful to or reproduce. They are not adapting a single text but instead seeking to extract an essence of James Cain and represent that in a new context. Though ostensibly based upon the literature of Cain, Blood Simple in fact takes its title from a passage in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. The passage illustrates the contention that those involved in murder or similar misdeeds often become weak-minded. The Coens' Blood Simple draws on crime fiction to develop a narrative which both features and challenges its traditions. Basic conventions of murder, greed, lust and betrayal function throughout the film, while the archetypal characters of private investigator, adulterous wife, vengeful husband and slick drifter are all present. The Man Who Wasn't There also engages with many of the conventions often ascribed to crime fiction. In the course of the narrative there will be clandestine meetings, double-dealing, murder and violence, negotiated within an overarching conception of fatalism. The themes of treachery and desire that define Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There reinforce the connection to Cain, with James Mottram contending that Cain's works "were not detective mysteries in the Chandler/Hammett vein, but novels concerning crimes of passion, usually centring on the betrayal of a man by a woman he has fallen for." (Mottram, 2000: 26) Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There both incorporate and undermine the conventions they adopt, at turns grasping onto Cain's style and the tropes of crime fiction for guidance and then letting go to find novel directions in which to take familiar material. With its cuckolded husband, adulterous wife, and violent killing, The Man Who Wasn't There employs the basic geometry of Cain's famous novella Double Indemnity. The film also derives from another Cain story -- Career in C Major -- the idea of the brow-beaten husband who has lost interest in his wife and his life. At the commencement of Career in C Major, the hero, Leonard, arrives home to ruefully find his wife entertaining friends. He confides to the reader: "I could hear them in there as soon as I opened the door, and I let out a damn under my breath, but there was nothing to do but brush my hair back and go in." (Cain, 1986: 188) The protagonist of The Man Who Wasn't There, Ed (Billy Bob Thornton), operates at much the same level of indifference towards his wife and her friends. As Ed sits rigidly on an uncomfortable looking couch alone in the living room while his wife receives the dinner guests for the evening, he discloses to the viewer in his typical monotone: "Me, I don't like entertaining." Ed unburdens himself to the viewer throughout the film in the persistently bland voiceover narration.
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